Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts

08/22/2026

David Russell plays Giulio Regondi's Air Varie, Op. 21. Regondi was a 19th-century guitarist and concertinist who spent much of his career in the UK, and his music for guitar sits somewhere between the salon and the concert hall. The Air Varie form gives a theme and then puts it through a series of variations, and Regondi uses that structure to cover a lot of expressive ground. Russell keeps it clean and focused throughout.

08/21/2026

Part 4 of Ana Vidovic's performance of Giuliani's Gran Sonata Eroica. The piece delves into a calm introspection between firework displays.

08/20/2026

Zoran Dukić plays Piazzolla's Adiós Nonino here with real weight behind it.

Piazzolla wrote this piece after his father died. That origin is in the music, and you can hear Dukić treating it that way. With immense passion as well as sorrow just like the way Piazzolla described Tango Music.

08/19/2026

Valentin Silvestrov’s Kitsch-Music No. 1 (1977) sounds almost too familiar and beautiful to be a late-20th-century work, and that’s essentially the point.

Silvestrov emerged from the Soviet avant-garde, experimenting with serialism and other modernist techniques, before making a radical turn toward tonal, lyrical music (think Chopin, Schumann, Schubert and Brahms).

Despite the title, “kitsch” isn’t meant as parody. Silvestrov described it as “elegiac rather than ironic.” – Oxford Academic.

He takes the familiar gestures and cliches of Romantic music and treats them like fragments of cultural memory, as though we’re remembering music we’ve somehow heard before, even when we haven’t.

It’s less an imitation of Romantic music than the memory of Romantic music, emerging briefly from the past before disappearing again.

Originally composed for piano, Marko Topchii performs his own arrangement on guitar.

08/19/2026

08/19/2026

Part 3 of Ana Vidovic's performance of Giuliani's Gran Sonata Eroica. These ascending chromatic octaves is a mainstay in Giuliani’s music and one of the techniques that make his music so fun to play.

08/18/2026

Eduardo Sainz de la Maza was a Spanish guitarist and composer, and a close contemporary of Andrés Segovia. His music sits comfortably in that world, written by someone who understood the guitar from the inside.

Campanas del Alba, "Bells of Dawn," has that quality you notice right away. The guitar imitates bells, not literally, but in the way the notes ring and overlap and fade. Scott Tennant, a founding member of the Grammy-winning Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, brings a lot of control to that resonance. He lets the sound breathe without letting it blur.

It's quiet music, but it asks a lot of the right hand. The tone stays even across the whole register, which is harder than it sounds.

08/17/2026

Melodico from Valses Poeticos by Enrique Granados expressed beautifully here by the Beijing Guitar Duo.

08/16/2026